Entertainment

BoredAt Work? Let the World Know, Anonymously.

Facebook can offer up some decent insight to the inner workings of college life, if you're included in a college network and know enough people that don't mind sharing TMI every chance they get. What if you could get every user to confess anything they feel like discussing, anonymously? BoredAt has already done this, with a number of closed networks launched for various universities across the country, and now it's taking its show on the road. Companies now can get in on the fun.

If you've had a chance to check out BoredAt, then you know that the closed networks are tailored for each university, and show the real time activity of anonymous comments being sent in by students (verified by localized IP address). With separate tabs for confessions, overheard quips, rants, sex talk and even alumni, what you get is a very undiscerning look at the real life culture of a school's population. I admit, it's a bit mesmerizing to watch the continually updating front page of a BoredAt network, just to see what asinine comment someone will say next.

I spoke with BoredAt co-founders Aneel Ranadive and Jonathan Pappas about the new sites being rolled out for corporate use, and the first thing that popped into my head was, "what kind of companies will be using this tell-all tool?" I specifically asked if this would be geared towards larger, tech savvy companies—smaller companies can't support such an anonymous communication tool. The answer is yes. BoredAt will expand to Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo as part of its corporate beta program.

There are other sites like CubeVoice that aim to get the gossip and undercurrents of the office environment, but BoredAt seems less concerned with the actual company per say, and focuses more on its inclination to simply collect content from users. Images, videos, thoughts, questions, advice—anything and everything under the sun. From there BoredAt has the capability of forming smaller communities around the idea of allowing users to present themselves anonymously, for things like listings.

As you can create any pseudonym for your own personal use at any given time, I found another interesting thing to do is filter BoredAt content according to names that people have chosen to mask their identity with. More than one person can use the same name, so the result can be a very interesting dialog within a community, speaking from a "named" perspective.

Voting options also appear for all the content, and it can also be tagged and commented on. I'll be anxious to see how BoredAt introduces additional tools tat smaller companies could perhaps take advantage of, whether it be included in a larger group or integrated somehow within another community.

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